36 o 0 o p ft D EVO"fEES of mountain climbing say that Yvon Chouinard, a thirty-eight- year-old climber who lives in Ventura, California, cannot get his hands on a piece of moun- taineering equipment without in- stantly trying to thin of ways to improve it. Chouinard has been climbing as often as possible, wherever possible, since he was sixteen years old, and today he is regarded as one of the great- est active mountain climbers in the world. He has done what is known among mountain- eers as extreme climbing-often first ascents-in Canada, the UnIted States, and Mexico, and as far south as Patagonia. He has made fifteen climbing trips to Britain and the Continent. He has climbed in New Zealand, on Mt. Kenya (where some of the guides used the metal climbing loops known as carabiners for earrings), and in the Himalayas of Pakistan. A list of Chouinard's first ascents would be almost end- less, but one of the most notable was made in October of 1 964 with Thomas Frost, Royal Rob- bins, and Chuck Pratt, all well- known California climbers. This was the ascen t of the North America '\7 all of EJ Capitan, in Yosemite National Park-an area so called because in the middle of the wall is a large section of black diorite whose shape IS roughly like that of the North "A.merican con- tinent. "fhe climbers spent ten days on the wall with nine hang- ing bivouacs-nine nights in hammocks suspended hori7ontally from the rock face, and with only down jackets for warmth. Harder climbs have subsequently been made in Yosemite, but when Chouinard and his friends climbed the North America \Vall it was regarded as the hardest rock climb ever done anywhere in the world. The four men managed to haul two hundred pounds of food and sixty quarts of water along with them up a rock face that is three thousand feet high and absolutely vertical. Quite apart from his extraordinary record as a climber, Chouinard has the reputation of being a virtuoso in the design of equipment. Alone or in col- labordtion with Frost, who was his business partner from 1966 until o F I ASCéNDING ", /. " ' , "'. '(' ,,\'\ -" --> K .\ -, .. :V/ .' ø i m_ . * ! I , i \, ') "" f ÞiI -, j \ II ''''' 4- / ') > " '9 1.u c. h. s Yvon Chouinard 1975 and then retired, Chouinard has svstematically redesigned almost every piece of equipment used in climbing. I-lis company, the Great Pacific Iron \V or ks, in V en tura, has become one of the largest manufacturers of climb- ing equipment in the world, and this year Chouinard expects more than two million dollars in gross sales of climbing gear-both hardware (nuts, ropes, ice axes, crampons, carabiners, pitons of all sorts) and software (climb- ing pants, shirts, sweaters, packs). The improvements that Chouinard and F rost have made in the design of climbing tools over the years have al- ways had their start in some difficulty that the two men encountered in adapt- L E 5 0= o ing eXIStIng equipment to their own climbing. "fhe number and variety of their innovations are as dazzling as the list of their climbs; among their designs are the Chouinard-Frost ice axe and the RURP (Realized Ultimate Rea1ity Piton). The design of the ice axe grew out of an at- tempt by Chouinard in 1968 to learn the French technique of ice climbing. Essential to ice climbing are crampons-down- ward-pointing metal claws to be strapped to the soles of climbing boots. In 1908, a British cEmber named Oscar Eckenstein devel- oped a ten-point design that be- came widely accepted, and in 1 93 1 an Italian guide and black- smith named Laurent Grivel modified this design by adding to it two prongs pointing forward from the toe. The change en- abled the climber to mount steep ice with front-pointing-driv- ing the two forward prongs Into the ice with hard kicks and climbing the ice as one would clImb stairs. This tech- nique, which came to be known as the German method, is espe- cially suitable for the eastern Alps, where the climber encoun- ters what is known as water ice. Water ice is frozen water that has been running-a frozen stream or a waterfall. It is brittle and extremely hard. In the west- ern Alps, the ice that is encoun- tered is glacier ice, which is compacted snow and is much softer and more porous. \Vith the French technique, the climber on steep glacier ice ascends side- ways, the feet placed firmly parallel to each other and at right angles to the inclination, making as much use as possible of the ten bottom points of the crampon. To maintain his balance, a climber using the French technique drives his ice axe in point first, like an anchor, above his head-a position that the French call piolet ancre. ChOUI- nard, who was climbing in Europe when he tried to learn this technique, found that unless the ice axe was placed per- fectly It tended to come out of the ice as soon as one began to climb. In 1968, he wrote an article on ice climbing- with photographs by Frost-for the Sierra Club journal A scent. He noted, "The designs of most of the mudern